“That’s no sort of good sense,” was the other’s rejoinder. “I shall be all right here, and it’s the only way out of the difficulty.”
“But, on your own showing, they will take it out of you,” urged Gerard, speaking quickly. “Didn’t you give that as a reason just now for not leaving Sintoba and the others behind? You go, and leave me to take my chance here.”
“Yes; but the cases are different, I can manage them better. You see, I understand them thoroughly, and you, after all, are a good bit of a novice. Still, you know enough of the country and people to get along among them, and find your way to Ulundi as quick as possible; but if you were left here on your own hook you’d likely make a mess of it. Tell the first you meet you are the bearer of a message to the king, and they will be bound to help you. They dare not refuse. We must pan out the thing, though, with every care. The main difficulty will, of course, be that of getting you clear out of this place, in the first instance. The rest is simplicity itself in comparison.”
In the dead of night, by the light of a lantern, the two would sit in the waggon-tent, while Dawes, with surprising accuracy, drew from memory, and in as small a compass as possible, a map of that section of the Zulu country which comprised their present place of captivity and the king’s capital and night after night, with their heads together, they would sit studying this rough plan, while Dawes pointed out the general features of the country—the lay of the mountains and the most convenient and least frequented route to be chosen. With extra good luck, he reckoned Gerard might make Ulundi in a little over two days—with ordinary luck it might take him four. But that Cetywayo would order their immediate release he never entertained or uttered the smallest doubt.
One day Gerard saddled up his pony, and started off alone to see how their stock was getting on. And, indeed, it really seemed that he was alone, for strange to say, none of the Igazipuza offered to accompany him, nor did he meet with a soul on the way. But between seeing nobody and being himself seen by nobody, he well knew there lay a wide difference, and he must be careful accordingly; indeed, he almost began to fear that this unwonted immunity from surveillance concealed a trap—was designed to draw him into some indiscretion, which might be turned into a reason for his destruction.
The intense longing to escape, however, soon overweighed all prudential consideration to the extent of causing him to scan for the fiftieth time every cranny and crevice in the face of the cliffs, which might by any chance afford exit. Surely there was some such—a cleft, a gnarled tree, a concealed passage. Hardly could he believe there was not. But, even as heretofore, he could not find it, and despondently he once more turned his horse to ride back to the waggons.
Suddenly the animal shied, and dropping his nose to the ground sniffed at something and then backed away, snorting. The white round object which had caused the alarm needed no second glance. It was a human skull.
Yet another lay there, its fleshless eye-holes staring upward from the grass. Scattered around were fragments of broken bones.
Gerard looked up. In his meditative fit he had ridden abstractedly, not seeing where he was going. Now he found himself at the foot of a great rock, and a cold shiver ran through his frame, for he recognised it as the rock called Izinyo, “The Tooth.” It was the rock of slaughter—“the tooth that eats,” as Vunawayo had grimly put it.
For various reasons he had always avoided this locality. He had no sort of an inclination to explore it—very much the reverse—and he feared lest in doing so he might unconsciously be offending the superstitions of the people. Now, thus brought by chance to its very base, he looked up at it with a cold, creepy sensation of shuddering awe. He contemplated it much as a Liberty, Equality and Fraternity “citizen” during the thick of the Reign of Terror, may have contemplated the guillotine, as an institution with which he might any day be called upon to cultivate a much closer acquaintance.